


and in their triumph

by endquestionmark



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 11:09:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8399371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: Maeve snorts. “So you think I’m your best bet? Sweetheart, you haven’t got a chance, paying customer or otherwise.”“Ah, but that’s all I’d like,” Hector says, and takes his hat off, holds it over his chest. “If that’s the asking price, then I’ll take the chance to make my case."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Today I learned that there is no readily available "period sex" trope tag, which seems like a serious omission. No, I didn't do the internal worldbuilding to figure out if the hosts have periods. We're all here for the existential horror and the improbable chemistry anyway, surely.

“You have a way with timing, don’t you,” Maeve says, chin propped up in her hands. Her glass of sherry is long gone, ground into the shards of the mirror; the bartender is dead, which is why she can take his place without fear of moralizing or molestation. When it’s her time of the month, Maeve knows that she can be short with well-meaning strangers. Hector is neither, and she has concerns other than paying him the typical courtesies rendered to a visitor at the Mariposa.

Hector shrugs, because he has no sense of manners. “Seemed as good a day as any.” He crosses the room. Glass crunches at every step. Maeve doesn’t own the saloon — just does business out of its rooms, and pays a pretty penny in rent for the privilege — but she can’t help thinking of the cost, to replace a mirror of that size. Silvered glass doesn’t come cheap when it needs to be put on a train and shipped miles from anywhere. He leans on the bar and nods at the few bottles which remain intact. “Don’t suppose you’d give me a recommendation.”

Maeve jerks her head at a half-empty jar. “Drink enough of that and you’ll go blind,” she says. “Drink it fast enough, and you might even manage it before the cavalry rides through.”

Hector looks at her for a long minute. “Some — admittedly disreputable — men appear to have told me some grievous lies about the hospitality on offer here.”

“Some admittedly disreputable men find it in their blackened hearts to pay for their entertainment,” Maeve retorts.

Hector hums. “That may be the case,” he says, rounding the bar. He ignores the bottles behind the bar and starts going through the ones under it, instead, picks out a handle of rye and drinks. “So tell me. If I wanted to pay for my pleasure, what would that cost me?”

Maeve stares at him until he sets the bottle down and meets her eyes. She starts counting items off on her fingers. “A new bartender,” she says.

“I’m not much for clean glasses,” Hector says, “but I might be able to manage.”

“A new mirror.”

He looks at the shards clinging to the frame as if seeing them for the first time. “Trickier,” he admits. “But if that were all—”

“All of the bottles that even you can’t crawl into anymore,” Maeve says.

“—then I’d be open to negotiation,” Hector says. “Drink is easy.”

“Oh, by all means.” Maeve gestures at the debris, the stink of a dozen varieties of spirit soaking into the floorboards. “Go on.”

Hector regards her, gaze level, bottle in hand. “And would that be all?”

“Unless you insisted on recompense for my time,” Maeve says, before she can think better of it. “But you don’t strike me as the generous type.”

“No.” Hector laughs, low and brief. “That I am not.” He takes another drink, and Maeve can smell it on his mouth, the campfire-smoke stain. “But I’m guessing that safe of yours has a lock on it, and I’d like to save myself a little trouble later on.”

Maeve snorts. “So you think I’m your best bet? Sweetheart, you haven’t got a chance, paying customer or otherwise.”

“Ah, but that’s all I’d like,” Hector says, and takes his hat off, holds it over his chest. “If that’s the asking price, then I’ll take the chance to make my case. That, or I suppose I’d have to break a few more of these bottles.”

 _What the hell,_ Maeve thinks. She tends towards rudeness when her blood is high, but she tends towards risk too, the sort of thrill that she only gets from bad bets with high stakes, and she can’t do much business, and she can smell the whiskey on Hector’s breath. Fire and powder, the liquor shining on his mouth and the warmth low in her belly; he might not have a chance, but Maeve is under no obligation to tell him that.

“A chance,” she says, and extends her hand. Hector takes it and offers her his arm. “And your word that your pack of strays won’t do any more damage while we’re occupied.”

“You have it,” Hector says without hesitation. He shrugs at the window, the panicked horses and occasional crack of a rifle from the street. “They’re occupied.”

Maeve tilts her head and considers him. “All right,” she says, “all right then.”

She takes him up the stairs to her room — he looks at the safe first, sets his bottle down on her dresser second and hangs his hat on its neck — and closes the door behind them.

Hector just looks at her.

After a long moment, Maeve takes pity on him. She perches on the edge of the safe, feet planted, arms crossed. “I know what you’re really here for,” she says. “Here’s a start: sixty.”

She can see it in his eyes, how badly he wants to go to his knees and turn the dial.

“Well?” she says. “Go on.”

He does, with an unpracticed grace, fingers clever on the mechanism despite his gloves, and then he looks up. “For services rendered,” he says, and sets his hands on her thighs, traces the seams of her stockings. Maeve shivers, and he tugs at her bloomers, gets them off and doesn’t flinch at the tang of iron, the stained cloth. He just tugs off his gloves and spreads her legs, calloused fingertips and—

— _with holy words—_

—Maeve blinks, and comes back to herself as Hector tugs her forward, one hand on her waist and the other spreading her as he noses at her cunt, mouth already slick. She makes a noise, all exhale and no restraint, and he holds her still; Maeve grabs at his shoulders, curls her fingers into what little leverage she can find, and thinks: _thank God I don’t have to fake it._

When he looks up — mouth shining, eyes half-closed, chin high as if waiting for approval — Maeve mistakes him for somebody else, for a moment. Or is it herself? Or is she mistaking the day — or is it something else entirely, the angle of the light — or the footsteps on the stairs; why does she feel, suddenly, as if she is remembering the moment rather than living it?

“Forty-seven,” she says, and the world slides dizzyingly into focus and then back out. There is blood on Hector’s mouth and his fingers, up to the second knuckle —  _one, two; what’s done cannot be undone_ , unsaid, unknown — but Maeve isn’t in pain. She feels as if she should be, so she forces herself to uncurl her fingers from his shoulder and tangle them in his hair instead; Hector smears fingerprints onto the dial of the safe when he turns it, and Maeve feels herself falling open as well.

She wonders which he likes better, her or the safe. No matter how dirty the business, it cannot countervail — but no, that’s wrong; do it well, Maeve thinks, _death do what he dare_ — but no, that isn’t right either. She must be missing something, forgetting, but then Hector applies his clever callused fingers to her pleasure instead and she cries out, all other thoughts gone.

Maeve is always a little too close like this, between the smell of blood and the way that she runs hot, and Hector is a little too much of a risk, a little too untutored and mercenary. He doesn’t seem to mind the mess, either, slicked over his mouth and under his nails, the way that Maeve pulls at his hair or the shove of her hips.

Under the floorboards, Maeve thinks, there is something that she has to ask Hector about, some other bargain that she should be striking, something desperately important that she just can’t remember over the thunder of her telltale heart, the roaring in her ears.

 _None of this matters,_ she thinks, and there it is: the thunder of feet on the floorboards outside, the hammering on the door. “Escaton!” someone shouts.

“He’s busy,” Maeve snaps, although the sentiment loses some of its sting when the second half is lost to a gasp. _Too swift arrives,_ too soon; she has too much to ask, too much to answer, but it’s too late. The scrape of her heels on the floor; the click of the mechanism as Hector sets his palm against it, sending the dials spinning; the click of a hammer being cocked, the endless pull of the trigger — the whiplash-crack of the impact — Maeve makes no sound when she comes, but pain blooms in her side, and she closes her eyes and shakes with it until she finally catches her breath.

Hector presses his face into the inside of her thigh, and leaves a bloody print. “As tardy as too late,” he says, and Maeve freezes.

“What?” she says. He looks up, surprised, and she pulls him up by his hair. “What did you say?”

“Just something I heard,” Hector says, eyes wide, and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. Blood up to the second knuckle, and Maeve wants to kiss him, wants to pull him close and consume him. “Sounds like we’re out of time.”

“Sounds like _you’re_ out of time,” Maeve says, and lets him go. She stands up, a little shakily, retrieves her garments and sets her skirts back in order. “Better luck next time, darling,” she adds, and catches herself again. There won’t be a next time, of course — blood under his nails, and the pain in her side is fading, but — people like Hector tend to find, one way or another, violent ends.

Maeve doubts that she’s any different, at the end of the day.

Hector retrieves his hat, but leaves the bottle; he opens the door, and waves her through. “After you,” he says.

No doubt his men will break the banister getting the safe down the stairs. Maeve would prefer to be far from any such liability.

“You’re—” she starts, and realizes that she has no way how to end the sentence. Hector is a low-down son of a bitch, no question about it, but he has a certain charm; Maeve can read his desires more easily than her own, in his forthright stare and the set of his jaw, the way he never quite manages to look away from her, no matter what else might be occupying his attention. _Civil night_ , she wants to say. A fucking reprobate, a rogue, a no-good layabout, a gentleman — the words clamor in her head, half a hundred names for half a hundred possibilities, all and yet none of them real, multiplying until they overwhelm sense and reason and rationality. “You’re—”

Downstairs, the pianola starts to play.


End file.
